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Goodbye strategies

And away we go!

For the past several years, our seniors have looked forward to filling the library display case with some sort of artistic expression relating to their plans for next year. This year, we added another element to this tradition. We asked them for a memory card. It hasn’t caught on quite as well as the college [...]

Help me share best practice with connectedlearningtv & YALSA

All this month,  YALSA and ConnectedLearningTV has hosted a series of conversations around teens and the future of school & public libraries, part of the year-long National Forum on Libraries and Teens.   The background: YALSA President H. Jack Martin and Crystle Martin, Postdoctoral Researcher for the Connected Learning Research Network, have been moderators the free virtual chats, which will look at the [...]

Thinking about credibility and about Turnitin’s SEER: The Source Educational Evaluation Rubric

seerrubric

I’ve not been a huge fan of listy/form type evaluation tools.  So much of the process of assessing credibility has to do with context. Black and white decisions and rules of thumb are far more fuzzy in a read/write, citizen journalist, open scholarship, media-rich web. Truth is, I often find value in casually published, unvetted [...]

Networking and the incoming class of 2017

graduate

The deposit checks are in the mail but the college buzz is buzzier than ever. Having survived the arduous college admissions process, our seniors are now taking full advantage of their opportunities to negotiate the social landcape of their newly selected school well before they land on campus in late August.   They are so much [...]

Thinking beyond the (summer) list

waking

I hadn’t thought about it till today, but our summer reading list is a snooze. A dinosaur. A relic of a time when reading lists looked like, well, reading lists. Today, two things woke me up. 1. Finished with her AP exam, Sierra asked me for a book recommendation.  I excitedly booktalked Libba Bray’s The [...]

Our first PSLA/MU Unconference

pslaunconf

I am a big fan of the unconference/edcamp movements and of open space planning.     And though I’ve personally been lucky to attend a number of local, regional, and national edcamps and unconfs, I’ve wanted to share my excitement about these participant-driven events with my TL colleagues in Pennsylvania.  Our traditional PSLA state conference is pretty darn [...]

“It’s about time, Dr. V!”: On maximizing database use with the one-login MackinVia app

One login screen for home use

Frankly, our password sheet has always been a royal pain. I’ve long been in search of an authentication solution–a relatively barrier-free strategy for out-of-school database access. For Mackin customers, MackinVia creates a single hub for e-books and database content–a one-user ID and password to your database collection (and your MackinVia ebooks) accessible from any internet-connected [...]

Web2MARC/DL2SL: Making our OPACs more gracious hosts

letusin

It’s time to bust open the OPAC. In fact, it’s long past time. My notion of collection development and of cataloging were a little different back in the day. I now consider digital resources–OER, images, videos, audio files, slideshows, documents, ebooks, maps, art, student work, data sets, interactivities, simulations, and especially the elements of the [...]

The new community-sourced Classroom 2.0 Book

Screenshot of the Scribd document

To celebrate its 5th anniversary the Classroom 2.0 Community (with the help of additional educational networks), recently released the community-sourced  Classroom 2.0 The Book. Inspired by and led by community founder, Steve Hargadon, with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), the project’s official deadline for submissions was today, April 21st. In [...]

On maximizing database use: Part 1, the one-page approach

databasesnightmare

A few questions continue to keep me up at night. Among them:  How can I get my students and teachers to discover and use our e-resources to the max?  What does face-out shelving look like in an e-collection? We are fortunate, I know it, to have a wonderful collection of subscription databases and e-books. We [...]